The New Ace Hotel in Downtown L.A. Celebrates the Silver Screen

At the newly opened Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles, the design collective Commune married inspirations from California modernists including Neutra and Schindler with some quirky Tinseltown touches. The result: a cool kid clubhouse both laid back and lavish.

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The vertiginous view from the tower offers a unique perspective of the United Artists building’s decadent terracotta façade.

Photo: Courtesy of Ace Hotel by Spencer Lowell

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In a move towards minimalism, most guest rooms were designed to retain the building’s original poured concrete ceilings.

Photo: Courtesy of Ace Hotel by Spencer Lowell

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When one-time tenant Televangelist Gene Scott relocated his headquarters, he left a piece of the gospel behind. A well-weathered sign reminds the oft-tempted citizens of the City of Angels that Jesus Saves.

A patchwork quilt and mustard carpet signal 70’s flare while a decidedly modern bed frame adds a contemporary twist.

Photo: Courtesy of Ace Hotel by Spencer Lowell

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Downtown Los Angeles is the sprawling city’s NEXT BIG THING, a Blade Runner Gotham of bodegas, garmento workrooms, and twenty-first-century five-and-dimes sprouting in majestic early-twentieth-century apartment and light industrial buildings, and cheek by jowl with fanciful Deco movie palaces. Catching this riff, the Ace team, with their usual prophetic instincts for interesting real estate, has worked with the holistic design collective Commune to transform the old United Artists building into an 182-room hotel.

The structure was built in 1927 by America’s sweetheart, the winsome silent movie actress Mary Pickford whose on-screen ringlets and dimpled smile belied an astute business sense. Charlie Chaplin was an early partner on the project but their relationship apparently soured and on a pre-party walk-through, Commune’s Roman Alonso pointed out the twin murals in the epic movie theater, one of which features Pickford front and center in an eye-catching and gleaming white gown whilst on the opposite wall, Chaplin is reduced to a tiny dark shadowy figure in a crowd. Find him if you can.

Pickford instructed her architects to look at the sixteenth-century late Gothic cathedral in Segovia for inspiration, and the magnificent entrance galleries and movie theater match the ambitions of that soaring monument to faith—for many years, this was the HQ of televangelist Reverend Gene Scott, and the neon Jesus Saves sign that he installed outside remains in situ. In Pickford’s day, of course, it was the silver screen that was being worshiped—the original drop curtain, reinstalled for the opening party, bears the legend The Picture’s the Thing.

I had visited the raw space a year ago when I was working on the Commune portfolio, so it was exciting to witness its unveiling. The coffee shop on the street front was already thronged with Williamsburg-esque hipsters (Acne Studios just opened a flagship store in the landmark green-tiled Eastern Columbia building next door, and had their opening party in the ACE space, and A.P.C., Oak NYC, and Aesop are soon to follow).

True to their creed, Commune have integrated the work of local artists and craftspeople into the project which they playfully imagined as a marriage of California mid-century modernism and Tinseltown fantasy “as if Rudolph Schindler and Pickford had had a child—a punk flapper!”

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Photo: Courtesy of Hamish Bowles

The Commune studio seem to have had a lot of fun photo researching images of punks and Bright Young Things to create collaged walls and doors in some of the entertaining spaces. “These walls are yours,” Commune instructed the artistic Haas Brothers Simon and Nikolai of the entrance areas and café. “Give us hieroglyphics and cave paintings!” And so, with a brief to “include Hollywood and that culture in a subtle way” they have covered the whitewashed walls with their elegant graffitis, depicting California mountainscapes.

Meanwhile, commissioned to camouflage “the ugliest wall in the whole project”—one covered with all the essential buildings code specific sprinklers, alarms, et al—artist Tanya Aguiñiga shredded sheepskins to create a strange sort of sci-fi fungal growth. In the rooftop Tower Bar, Aguiñiga has created another site-specific wall treatment, like sixties textile art, whilst costumer and artist Michael Schmidt has hung an installation of chains from the ceiling that look like jungle lianas.

On the terraces outside, bougainvillea has been planted and will eventually form living walls, and Alma Allen’s organic wood stools, coffee tables, and bars are illuminated with Adam Silverman’s terracotta lanterns. Inspired by an image of a North African tented courtyard, artist Alia Penner made what she calls “Secessionist meets Navajo” designs on the underside of the awnings.

The rooms themselves, in a disciplined mid-century California palette of black, gray, and mustard, channel the streamlined practicality of Schindler and Neutra, and the dreamy Los Angeles light streams in through the tall windows.

Each room has just one piece of art: a postcard-size image by artist Mike Mills set into the door to the toilet. Mills researched photographs from the year 1927: The back of the door reveals its details. In the room I visited, there was an image of Zelda Fitzgerald, and on the back, one of her poems. At the party to inaugurate the hotel, the genteel buffet dinner on the upstairs terraces thronged with the city’s taste-meisters (everyone from Lisa Eisner to Band of Outsiders’ Scott Sternberg), segued into a raucous dance party for thousands of Los Angeleno hipsters in the cavernous theater and hallway galleries downstairs, and the spirit of the Fitzgeralds lived on.